How many batteries does your smart house solar system need?

An important question to consider when installing a smart house solar panel system is whether you need to add batteries to store energy. There are many benefits with batteries, such as avoiding peak electricity costs, reducing your carbon footprint, and being able to use electricity during power outages.

Once you decide you want a battery, the next question is,

“How many batteries do I need?”

Smart house solar batteries vary in different sizes, so a more appropriate method is to figure out the capacity, power, and other specifications you need, and then start from there. You should consider factors such as daily energy consumption, battery specifications, and the main purpose of household batteries.

In most cases, people use batteries to store excess energy for use at night or when the battery panels do not produce any electricity. Therefore, most solar panel users only need to store electricity for one night.

In this article, we will introduce all the details so that you can equip your solar panel system with the perfect household battery.

Household battery

In order to figure out what type and how many batteries you need, you must first understand some details of the household battery itself. There are 3 main factors that influence the decision of the owner of a solar panel on the home battery:

Capacity

Capacity refers to the total power that the battery can store. This is the unit of kilowatt-hour (kWh), which represents the size of the battery.

The rated power of a solar cell is the amount of electricity that can be delivered at one time. This is calculated in kilowatts (kW) and directly affects the amount of electricity extracted from the battery. So, if you want a battery that can power many smart home appliances and devices at the same time, you need a high power rating.

Depth of discharge (DOD)

DoD is the amount of power used by the battery. For example, if the battery has 30% power left, then the Department of Defense has 70% left. The Ministry of Defense is important because due to the chemical composition of some household batteries, you must ensure that the Ministry of Defense will never reach 100%. This means that for most household batteries, the capacity you need is slightly larger than the maximum capacity actually needed.Enough 

Reserved power for evening use

Now that we have the details, we can start to look at the main use cases of home batteries.

For ordinary smart house solar panel systems, the battery can be used as a backup battery at night and when the sun goes down. In order to know how many batteries you need, all you need to do is to figure out how much energy you have used during this time, and then find a battery that can deliver this amount of kilowatts to your home.

If the average monthly electricity consumption of an American household is about 900 kilowatt-hours, then the household’s daily electricity consumption is about 30 kilowatt-hours. If we zoom further down to night, this could be anywhere between 5-10 kWh being used. This means that in order to meet the typical energy demand during this time, you will need a battery with a capacity of approximately 10 kWh and a rated power of at least 5 kWh.

The size of the battery ranges from 2 kWh to 16 kWh or more. They can even be connected together to double the capacity. Home battery power ratings can vary widely from battery to battery, and there are even incentives for some batteries that total in the thousands of dollars.

Conclusion:

There are several choices of smart house solar batteries, capacity and power, and other factors that will affect the number of batteries you need. If you want to use all or most of the lithium batteries, buy one. It is more expensive than lead acid or AGM, but you don’t need to charge it at 50% of the power. If you don’t mind the limited Department of Defense, you can use a lead-acid battery because it still works. All these options are suitable for typical solar customers, so don’t hesitate to start your search!